HTML5 version Android: Apps or Web for mobile development??

This is a hotly discussed topic recently. The web is now a fully-capable platform and it's getting better and better as the HTML5 standard advances. And that's actually also the point why we're even here to discuss topics like this. QCon London this year clearly showed the trend which is going into the HTML5 + JavaScript direction rather than for native.

If it's for me personally, then I'd say you "go and develop a fancy nice Android app". Why? Because you have its full power at hand, a market where to deploy it and hence a nice potential audience which is going to consume it. That's the point! Your range of target consumers. I'm saying this, though, because I'm and Android fanboy, I know how to develop Android apps and I love to develop for it!

But if you're in the industry, more specifically, in the web industry, things change immediately. A major fact there are the human resources and the required knowledge you have to deal with/acquire. That's exactly the scenario where I'm currently in. As an architect in a web development company, I cannot just say "come on, lets open another development branch, hire good mobile devs or train existing ones". Well, I could, but it wouldn't be the most economic way of doing things. Instead, what you aim to do is to reuse existing resources, in the form of knowledge and devs as much as you can. Because in the end, (at least for now) 80-90% of our focus will still be the web platform, but we have to be ready also for the remaining 10-20% allocated to the mobile part. And the latter one is growing enormously fast.

I predict that this year Apple will announce a new programming model for iOS which will be based on Javascript.

IMHO that would be great. Consider how many more people would start developing for iOS if they would be granted to develop in a language they know (JavaScript and HTML5) and to publish their "web" mobile apps on the official market.